Using "$RANDOM" to generate a random string in Bash

Question

I am trying to use the Bash variable $RANDOM to create a random string that consists of 8 characters from a variable that contains integer and alphanumeric digits, e.g., var="abcd1234ABCD".

How can I do that?

Answer 1

Use parameter expansion. ${#chars} is the number of possible characters, % is the modulo operator. ${chars:offset:length} selects the character(s) at position offset, i.e. 0 - length($chars) in our case.

chars=abcd1234ABCD
for i in {1..8} ; do
    echo -n "${chars:RANDOM%${#chars}:1}"
done
echo